Hitchens: Why Haditha isn't My Lai.

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The other difference, one ought not need add, is that in My Lai the United States was fighting the Vietcong. A recent article about the captured diary of a slain female Vietnamese militant (now a best seller in Vietnam) makes it plain that we were vainly attempting to defeat a peoples' army with a high morale and exalted standards. I, for one, will not have them insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us.

The Hell of WarBy Christopher HitchensMonday, June 5, 2006

Unjust
though the assumption may prove to be, let us imagine that the Marines
of Kilo Company did indeed crack up and cut loose in Haditha that day.
Something like this has certainly been waiting to happen. I wrote in this space
almost a year ago about a warning delivered to the U.S. commanders in
Iraq by their British counterpart Gen. Michael Jackson. He told them
that their "zero tolerance" force-protection measures, which allow for
the use of deadly fire if anyone comes too close, ran a serious risk of
losing Iraq. (Recent clumsy skirmishes in Kabul, though they do not
involve any allegation of deliberate murder, make the same point in a
different way.)

It's thus a bit harder than one might like to
argue that a Haditha-type incident would have been an "isolated" one.
The combat in Iraq and Afghanistan is overwhelmingly political, and
there is no soldier who doesn't know that it's imperative for this
reason—to say nothing of any moral objections—to use his or her
firepower with exact discrimination. If this principle is not being
meticulously observed, then it means that there is a rupture in
training and discipline, which would be a serious enough story in its
own right.

However, all the glib talk about My Lai
is so much propaganda and hot air. In Vietnam, the rules of engagement
were such as to make an atrocity—the slaughter of the My Lai villagers
took almost a day rather than a white-hot few minutes—overwhelmingly
probable. The ghastliness was only stopped by a brave officer who
prepared his chopper-gunner to fire. In those days there were no
precision-guided missiles, but there were "free-fire zones," and "body
counts," and other virtual incitements to psycho officers such as Capt.
Medina and Lt. Calley. As a consequence, a training film about My
Lai—"if anything like this happens, you have really, truly screwed
up"—has been in use for U.S. soldiers for some time.

The other difference, one ought not need add, is that in My Lai the United States was fighting the Vietcong. A recent article about the captured diary
of a slain female Vietnamese militant (now a best seller in Vietnam)
makes it plain that we were vainly attempting to defeat a peoples' army
with a high morale and exalted standards. I, for one, will not have
them insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen
Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us. These
depraved elements are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge. They have two methods of
warfare. One is the use of random murder to create a sectarian and
ethnic civil war—perhaps the most evil combination of tactics and
strategy it is possible to imagine. The other is the attempt to
alienate coalition soldiers from the population.

Even before
the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Saddam's foreign minister, Naji Sabry,
wrote a memo about how to combat the increasing fraternization between
advancing Americans and Iraqi civilians. Send some suicide bombers to
the scene, he recommended, and force a wedge between the two. The
Americans would then learn to distrust anyone who approached. As with
the foul policy above, the awful thing about this charming policy is
that it works. Which leads us to one very important conclusion: Any
coalition soldier who relieves his rage by discharging a clip is by
definition doing Zarqawi's work for him, and even in a way obeying his
orders. If anything justifies a court-martial, then surely that does.

It's
not amusing to see fascist killers hiding behind human shields and then
releasing obscene videos of the work that they do. Nor is it rewarding
to clean up the remains of a comrade who has been charred and shredded
by a roadside bomb. To be taunted while doing so must be unbearable.
The humane George Orwell, writing of his life as a colonial policeman
in Burma in Shooting an Elephant, told his readers that there
were days when "I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be
to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts." But he did not, in
fact, succumb to this temptation. And the British were unwanted
colonial occupiers in Burma, while the coalition forces are—until
further notice—the guests of Iraq's first-ever elected government and
the executors of a U.N.-mandated plan for the salvage and
reconstruction of the country.

There is no respectable way of
having this both ways. Those who say that the rioters in Baghdad in the
early days should have been put down more forcefully are accepting the
chance that a mob might have had to be fired on to protect the National
Museum. Those who now wish there had been more troops are also
demanding that there should have been more targets and thus more body
bags. The lawyers at Centcom who refused to give permission to strike
Mullah Omar's fleeing convoy in Afghanistan—lest it by any chance be
the wrong convoy of SUVs speeding from Kabul to Kandahar under cover of
night—are partly responsible for the deaths of dozens of Afghan
teachers and international aid workers who have since been murdered by
those who were allowed to get away. If Iraq had been stuffed with WMD
warehouses and stiff with al-Qaida training camps, there would still
have been an Abu Ghraib. Only pacifists—not those who compare the Iraqi
killers to the Minutemen—have the right to object to every casualty of
war. And if the pacifists had been heeded, then Slobodan Milosevic, the
Taliban, and Saddam Hussein would all still be in power—hardly a
humanitarian outcome. People like to go on about the "fog" of war as
well as the "hell" of it. Hell it most certainly is—but not always so
foggy. Indeed, many of the dilemmas posed by combat can be highly
clarifying, once the tone of righteous sententiousness is dropped.